In the last episode we posited that in order to achieve self actualisation, purpose, or peak experience, you have to risk your more basic needs - food, shelter, safety. We further posited that living damages you.

You cannot live without taking damage, whether from the various knocks and blows, mental and physical, or through the process of aging. And the flip side of that is that you cannot live without damaging those around you, whether by eating them or through the moral and ethical decisions we make every day. You cannot live a full and interesting life without hurting people - friends, family, the loved ones who become exes. You cannot have agency without sometimes having to choose the lesser of two evils.

We’re not endorsing this, we’re lamenting it - but it’s still true. You can’t live without hurting people, and you can’t live without being hurt. The question is what does that mean ethically? What are the implications for your life and existence? We must navigate between the Scylla of nihilism - accepting this and not caring about it - and the Charybdis of inaction and stasis, being left frozen and unable to act because to act is to harm.

Once you notice this you see Charybdis in particular operating everywhere. Our government never actually does anything because any decisive action means harming people - take the recent failed welfare bill as an example. Even the best decision will involve tradeoffs, will make some groups less well off in the short term in exchange for better long-term outcomes for the entire country, and so it’s generally easier to make no decisions at all. Our whole culture ends up trapped in the trolley problem, with nobody brave enough to throw the switch. The result is stasis and inertia - a whole country doing the equivalent of sitting in front of the sofa watching Netflix because going outside and trying new things is too risky.

But what is more likely to lead you to an early death than sitting in front of Netflix for your whole life?

So not accepting this idea that life entails damage ends up causing more harm than accepting it. To live well, to rule well, we need to be at peace with causing damage, we need to meet this reality head-on, and as we lament the damage we cause we must strive to ensure that it is worth it.

This episode brings together a number of threads we have discussed recently - injuries, blood sacrifice, museums, Heidegger, nature, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s also the fourth episode in which we’ve talked at length about Roberto Calasso’s book The Ruin of Kasch, which is excellent.